The Secret Sauce to Make Any Business Work

I’ve read a lot of business books.  Books on management, leadership, advertising, marketing, internal processes, hiring, motivational and inspirational books.  I link to think I’m somewhat well read on the subject.  If all these authors were my patient teachers, I don’t doubt I would hear a great collective sigh of relief that I am finally beginning to understand.

Moneylender is the primary product that my company produces.  It’s not surprising that the vast majority of my time is spent on Moneylender-related activities.  For fifteen years, I worked almost every day to build the best solution to the problem of managing loans that I could conceive.  I’m pretty happy with the result, now manifest in Moneylender 3.

That’s great, really it is.  Having a product that holds my complete confidence is a very important part of being a successful business.  But I missed the point.  Sometimes narrowly, sometimes entirely, but I definitely didn’t quite get the reality of the situation as it was being so masterfully described by authors and mentors.

I’m a shy person, of a sort.  I appear outgoing in most social situations, but I’m prefer not to talk much about myself until I feel like I really have the lay of the land.  I want to know how I can best fit into a situation first, and then I will contribute where I feel myself most useful.  It works well for not stepping on toes, listening first and talking second, making a good impression.  Great for a professional in a business community, or at the in-law’s family reunion, but only now do I really see how this attitude has impeded my businesses for the last twenty years.  My confidence in Moneylender at an all-time high, I’m finally willing to show the world all that it is, and I see just how silly my attitude had been across my professional career.

The start of the movie Cabin Boy has an apropos quote: “Nothing so liberates the heart as when a fool awakes from his folly.”

Half the books I’ve read have been sales books, advertising and promotion, marketing books.  I originally drew up the idea for this article around the observation that Richard Gerber’s The eMyth book spent half the time telling the reader to stop pretending the entrepreneurial spirit was some magic essence that some people possessed while others were lacking.  I misunderstood his message at the time.  While I heard “Entrepreneurs aren’t some unique thing, and you either got it or you don’t”, what he was really saying is “forget trying to be an ‘Entrepreneur’ at all, and just do what I tell you.”  If I had really understood the message at the time, I might have dropped my own notion that my software would be the best software and that’s why I would succeed.  His message was, yes, great software is essential, but it won’t make your business successful.

Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad, Poor Dad tried fruitlessly to explain the same message to an aspiring writer when he pointed out the key to his success was written right on the cover of his book: “best-selling author”, not “best-writing author”.  Like myself, that hopeful author was unable to cast aside personal visions of the world to hear the message from those that understand.

The ENTIRE second half of The eMyth is how to do marketing.  A subject I had read about so much that I again missed the simple truth.

So now my friends, at last, I get to the point of this article.  Half my efforts must be concerned with the business of getting people to buy my software.  Not one fifth, not one quarter, not 48%.  Half of my effort must be spent on promoting my software, on marketing.

The closest I had ever been to running a truly successful business was when I had very nearly found this ratio by happy accident.  I employed two full-time phone sales people, making cold calls all day long selling websites.  I had a part-time designer, a part-time writer, a part-time coder, and myself.  When the team was at its peak, we could design, write, code, configure, publish, optimize, market and register a website from scratch every three days.  The thing was, I only had two salespeople working full-time.  Making matters worse, while a straightforward and supportive manager, I was undoubtedly inexperienced.  I was in my early-to-mid-twenties, so I can cut myself a little slack.  If I had put a lot more of my attention into helping the salespeople get the tools and resources they needed to be really effective, if I had been willing to monitor and address performance problems among the sales staff, if I had hired two more salespeople.  Had I done those things, I would likely have been very profitable.

It took a full decade of distance to see the simple truth.  These authors are all correct – marketing is the single most important thing a small business does.  If no one know about you, thinks about you, hears about you, then you don’t have any revenue.  It has to be half, too.  The occasional flirt with marketing cannot sustain a real business.  It must be continuous, reliable, repeatable, innovative, collaborative, direct and touching. 

With four salespeople, we would have had a backlog of websites to build, a single person wouldn’t have been able to sink the ship.  There would be no shortage of revenue nor of work for the team.  As luck would have it, both salespeople had personal emergencies at the same time.  As the manager it was my fault for not getting new ones into their seats immediately instead of standing around and scratching my head.

So now, reflecting on the various ruins of my entrepreneurial fits and starts, Moneylender Professional the dogged exception, still bustling amidst the rubble, I can finally say I own this knowledge for myself.  I will, forevermore, dedicate one half of my effort on any venture into marketing.  I will not wait until I feel like my product is absolutely perfect, hiding in my comfort zone.  I will share my efforts happily and purposefully.

I’ll prove my understanding.  I am building a browser game.  It’s a silly game, and at present there’s almost nothing to do in it.  But I have it online, and I’m inviting friends to dink around with it.  I’m posting little status updates to the company Facebook page.  I’m building the game for fun, but I’m taking it seriously.  I’ve been building a robot, too. And I’m posting about that from time to time as well.  These things are well below the “perfection” I’m always chasing, but I need to talk about them.  Marketing for a project is like watering plants.  It will wither and die just the same without the sustaining force of an involved and growing community.

Most of my customers are professional lenders.  And most know that marketing, even when your product is money, is how you find those good borrowers and get those consistent loan payments.  The really desperate borrowers that are rejected by the easy to find lenders might trickle down to more obscure lenders to find a loan.  The creditworthy don’t need to look very hard to find money when they need it.  Most of my customers are WAAAYYYYY ahead of me in learning this lesson, thankfully.

If you’re getting started, or having a hard time finding good borrowers, put half your time into marketing.  Whatever way you can think of to market yourself, try it out and see how it works.  Try lots of things at the same time.  Keep changing it up.  Learn and grow.  Your business will reflect the effort happily on the bottom line.

And, of course, if you manage loans, use Moneylender Professional.  The result of fifteen years of loving craftsmanship.  I just helped a customer do some annual updates and she remarked that “everything you could ever want to do, it’s all just to easy in your software.”  I hope to eventually make that statement true for every customer that uses my system.